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Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

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Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#61
Maybe 'engage' with the AWS sales team?

Like I am doing...I have £300K of annual cloud and dedi hosting costs spread over several providers so I reached out to the sales team last week. I'm sure they'll be rushing to call me any day now - I just hope it's not this afternoon as I'll be on a booked call with Google.

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#63
Shameless plug: if you are using autoscaling and have stateless/12factor components, you would like to try spot instances but don't feel like spending time and much effort with a migration to spot fleets, just give autospotting a try.

It will continuously replace your group's on-demand instances with the best priced compatible(at least as big and identically configured) spot instance types, with minimal configuration changes performed by simply tagging the group. The group configuration is unchanged so it would keep launching on demand when scaling out or when replacing outbid spot instances.

The tool is open source and available on github and can be set up in a few minutes: https://github.com/cristim/autospotting

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#64
That depends a lot on your application, that said, i'd like to add CloudFront. The more you respond from the CDN cache, the less requests hits your backend and that can be huge, it is not unusual to offload 80-90% of traffic.

When it hits the backend, if it is Lambda functions you can also save a lot by ensuring you don't have wasted resources. Same idea for databases, DynamoDB is very cost effective. Usually the less you manage or provision by hand, the more you save.

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#65
We developed a continuous scalability testing technology that lets you meet the concurrency and throughput requirements of your microservices build, before they ship to production.

Our community uses this information to reduce the waste at the software, middleware and AWS level. e.g. configure Auto Scaling groups to scale upon reaching a custom ELB Target Trigger equal to your measured concurrency.

I wrote an article about this specific ELB use case a couple weeks ago, at https://medium.com/@stacktical/how-to-lose-money-with-the-ne...

Maybe it can give you some ideas.

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#68

Rather than spot instances, use spot fleets and structure your bid such that you arbitrage across different node types and data centers that are equivalent for you. We cut our spot expenses by 20% , which were already cheaper than on-demand by about 70%. No matter how we played with the price calculator, Google was twice as expensive than our spot fleet algorithm

Can you provide some details about your spot fleet algorithm ?

Re: Ask HN: How did you significantly reduce your AWS cost?

#70
Blueprint your Footprint

Observe your AWS footprint. Dump it as CloudFormation, or hook up a tool like http://hava.io or http://www.visualops.io/ to get a spatial representation of your infrastructure.

They both have powerful costing tools. Use this data in conjunction with your baseline performance metrics (memory/CPU/disk consumption) and see if there are any broad savings to be made by refactoring your platform.

If you have been steadily adding components (and their SG dependencies), its likely there is no clear understanding of the End-to-End scope of your AWS footprint.

From all this data comes your Blueprint. You choose what's necessary; VPC, ELB, AZ, RDS, S3, R53 and so on.

Use something that is not the AWS console to define and capture a new, blueprinted environment and deploy it. See if it does the job by running your availability and performance suite on it.

Start doing Blue/Green Deploys so your costs are reflective of your application.

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